From a language level, Clay offers a lot of features over plain old C: strong typing, type parameters, polymorphism, etc. All of the additional features map onto the machine in a very specific way, giving you the same kind of control that structs, arrays, etc. do in C. It doesn't force garbage collection on you. You can even call external C functions by simply declaring them, similar to how you would do it in C itself.

Clay seems to have a lot of potential in the systems programming space. The language is still in a bit of flux, but it's the first C alternative that still has me excited after using it (which can't be said for C++, D, Go, or Rust).

The folks in #clay on freenode are very friendly and helpful. You can tell that they've been keeping up with advances in PLT but that they also understand the kinds of low-level things systems programmers need to do.